Are the kids alright? 30 years ago, the news that two children had taken it upon themselves to murder a third was a moment in the national consciousness that stopped us in our tracks. Nowadays, it appears that we’ve either gone numb or deaf to the phenomena.
I have in the last few years lost track of how many teenagers and young people appear to die at the hands of others. Just this month, I can think of three; but it seems week in and out we see minor headlines on the BBC about another stabbing victim somewhere (who invariably ends up being a minor) and nothing more is said or done.
The causes are difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat. “Community centres” have become the go-to meme response as people – left and right-wing alike – debate whether a community centre or a skate park could have prevented these deaths, but none seem to grasp the wider issues that feed into these unfortunate and tragic outcomes.
Since 2010, almost 25,000 police officers were slashed, as were their budgets. The effects could not have been felt harder: crime feels almost decriminalised in Britain as thefts and burglaries go uninvestigated, and conviction rates for serious crimes dwindle. The prison system invariably is also under strain as a lack of infrastructure, staff, and adequate sentencing leads offenders to be often out and back on our streets sooner than is necessary for community protection. What is the result? Police forces pursue “easy” victories that use limited resources, and you end up being investigated over offensive tweets whilst the assailant who robbed you at knifepoint the night before is left to slink into the shadows. Reporting a crime to the police now seems more of a formality for the sake of your insurance, rather than anything else.
However, the structural issues – policing, prisons, courts – only explain the proliferation of crime itself; not this apparent uptick in youth criminality. How have we reached a position whereby two 15-year-old children feel capable of stabbing another to death? At the risk of becoming a jaded geriatric, I fear the cause of the issue lies in the technology itself, and the way we now socialise children. In the 24 years since David Bowie said that the internet would become both exhilarating and terrifying, his words could not have come truer. In my pocket, I now carry the means to communicate instantly with anyone I want; to scroll page after page of Wikipedia and see what the people I care about are up to. I also have access to the social undercurrents that pre-internet were confined to alleys and abandoned warehouses, and those undercurrents have access to me.
The internet has ended childhood as we know it. The mistakes and foibles of adolescence, which previously were left on playgrounds, are now a part of your digital footprint that will follow you into adulthood. You are exposed to predators, pornographers, peddlers and perverts far easier and more conveniently than our parents were, and you as a child are expected to negotiate a culture where sex, drugs and criminality in adulthood is now available – dare I say made attractive – to you.
How does a 15-year-old find themselves carrying a knife with the intention of using it on another person? How does a 15-year-old find themselves crossing national borders to join a terrorist organisation? How does a 15-year-old find themselves escorting illegal substances on behalf of older, organised criminal gangs? Because they have been left online and found – or been found by – people that have groomed them to do so. Parents who would not dream of leaving their child alone in a shopping centre, leave them on the internet for hours at a time with the same level of vulnerability because they do not understand, or do not care to understand, the internet and the threats it can pose.
This is not to say that the internet does not bring benefits. This topic is so thorny because of that truth: that to restrict children from the internet in their entirety would be impossible in a world where adults have made technology and tech literacy a core component of civilisation. Government legislation has attempted to strike a balance and thrown up more issues as adults have to contend with how methods of protecting children may negatively impact their own ability to use the internet the way that we do.
Internet usage is perhaps going to end up being a topic that, like sex, drugs, and alcohol, parents will have to talk to their children about moderation and limits. You only have to scratch a 20-something with a presence in online spaces to realise the extent of the issue: whether that be people joking about liveleak videos of ISIS executions, the prevalence of self-harm and the culture around it on tumblr in the last decade, all the way through to online communities that eventually breed terrorists – some as young as 13.
We cannot begin to understand why children commit crimes as shockingly as adults without understanding that in the age of the internet we have abolished childhood. Children grow up faster now but with all the instability and recklessness that marks adolescence, and unfortunately this leads to some slipping through the cracks and into things that lead to negative outcomes for all involved. If Conservatives seek to protect children, and build functioning and cohesive communities, they must accept this reality and begin to understand how we can preserve some semblance of childhood for generations which have no understanding of a world without the internet.
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We Need a Che Guevara of Our Own
The title might be misleading at first, but there is a good reason for that. To understand the needs and opportunities for the contemporary Right, we first need to understand what got the Left into power at first.
Enter Che Guevara, or more exactly, enter Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.
For anyone in either the free-market or the classical conservative sphere, the travel log of his motorcycle trip around Latin America should be a required reading. Not because it is an historical account of the radicalization of one man, who from well-educated Argentinian bourgeois doctor went to terrorist, revolutionary and guerrilla leader, but because it shows the seeds of how a simple man with ideas (albeit in his case, the worst ones) can become an archetype, a religious icon for a set of beliefs.
Even for someone like Murray Rothbard himself, Che Guevara was someone worth of interest, to the point of writing a highly critical but yet prophetic obituary for him, and Rothbard, of course, was right, because Che Guevara has probably become the most well-known political figure in recent Latin American history, and outside of the developed West, that is, the US-led Anglosphere and Western Europe, his face and his name have become synonymous with armed struggle, with guerrilla warfare, with an utopian socialist ideal that knows no limits nor boundaries.
His death at the hands of the Bolivian Army, helped by the CIA, in a failed attempt to spark an agrarian Marxist revolution in the Andean Altiplano, only contributed more to his already legendary status among those who oppose the ideas of freedom and civilization.
In practice, his death made him a martyr of the Left, a religious symbol of a revolution that never came but is always presented as the gospel of egalitarianism. Say what you want about Che Guevara, say he was a killer and a terrorist, and you will be right. But that doesn’t take away the fact that Che was ready to die for his ideas, and in fact did so.
The Right, neither conservative nor libertarian, doesn’t have a single person who has gone to such extents. We don’t have martyrs, and our beliefs are not religious. We may think of the self-immolating acts committed by the likes of Alex Jones or Kanye West as martyrdom for our causes, like free speech, but they are nothing but counterproductive folk activism.
In fact, our beliefs, are quite the opposite to a religious fanatism, for they are rooted in the reasonable analysis of history, nature and society, and as such, the results of our ideas, even if adequate on a long term, are not easy to sell to high-time preference masses, who have become used to receive subsidies from governments and have internalized the propaganda created by the corporate-managerial class that works in tandem with policy-makers.
Our society is deadlocked between an individual struggle for freedom and an organized struggle for power, and our times are stranger than ever, for they represent what Francis Fukuyama still insists is the End of History, but look closer to the civilization end stage described by Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West magnum opus.
The problem is that if we take either Fukuyama’s or Spengler’s words for granted, we’re still left without some key elements to understand the mechanics of our age: liberal democracy is indeed the dominant system all around the world, but it is not liberal (for it is not generous, as defined by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and because it creates false, unstable prosperity out of heavy taxation, inorganic monetary emission and general government intervention of the economy), nor it is democratic (for it allows everyone to vote, no matter who or what “the People” is or is intended to be, and reserves power only for an unelected managerial class.)
If this account of facts is remindful of James Burnham’s ideas, it is because he, like Spengler, identified elements of our current collapse, and tried to predict its future by equating the imminent managerialism of the West with Soviet Stalinism and Italian fascism, and in many senses, Burnham was right, and Western managerialism has indeed become something akin to fascism, although without the nationalism, as Lew Rockwell has repeatedly warned us.
But where does that leave us and how is Che Guevara connected to all of this?
Simple: for Burnham, as well as for Spengler, as theorists of Western collapse, the system that would be in place in the endgame of civilization would depend on strongmen like Cecil Rhodes to work smoothly, for they, as the Great Men in History described by Thomas Carlyle, would be the only ones able to take the reins of power to direct society.
This mention of Cecil Rhodes is not random, because he could probably be considered the best example of how a Great Man idea must be compensated with a sound understanding of historical processes, and because Rhodes, like Che Guevara, was strongman, a tactician and a born leader. In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s words, he was a natural elite.
From an English boy with poor health, the son of an Anglican priest, he became a mining magnate and then an important politician in South Africa. His talent for business allowed to thrive and prosper, and his short stay in Oxford University shaped his worldview into one of British dominance and influence.
In the same fashion as other strongmen before him, Rhodes was elevated into the highest prestige in his last years and after his death, with the British colonies he helped to acquire getting named after him (not unlike Bolivia being named after Simón Bolívar), with his South African estate becoming the campus for the University of Cape Town, and with his large fortune left to fund the Oxford scholarship named in his honor, which has helped educated thousands of politicians and enterprise heads from all around the Anglosphere, with the original intent of shaping them to think in the same way Rhodes himself thought about a British-dominated world.
But his legacy hasn’t prospered as much as the almost religious veneration Che Guevara has acquired, for the idea of Rhodes, the imperial businessman and politician, once respected as an ideal of the British Empire, has now become anathema even in the very institution he attended and donated his fortune to, for the gospel of egalitarianism cannot allow the veneration of natural elites, in their own times and contexts.
Che Guevara, on the other side, by living fast and dying young, by focusing and sacrificing himself to his ideas, created a myth around and about himself, a myth that men like Cecil Rhodes could have never even achieved.
And now, in our Populist age, where political and business leaders emerge out of the polarization of ideas and beliefs, where strongmen and magnates like Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk can lead thousands of supporters and yet still have troubles to hold or exercise power in their own spheres of influence, the question remains: what are we missing that the Left does have?
We may not realize it, but the Left is currently lacking this key element: they don’t have natural elites, they don’t have caudillos, they don’t have true leaders.
In their inflation of their egos, they have elevated the likes of Klaus Schwab and Samuel Bankman-Fried into their demigods, and when the societal collapse they have caused themselves may finally come, they won’t be able to prevent it or to mitigate it.
But here is where and when our duty becomes clear: if the Left is a fanatic religious movement focused on enforcing egalitarianism, and if the Left has had its martyrs like Che Guevara, then our fight, just as Rothbard said, must also be a religious crusade, one for the defense of freedom and civilization.
But to fight such a fight you don’t only need fighters, you need leaders, tacticians, strategists. Not everyone can be one, because our natural differences make us spontaneously inclined to different activities and positions in life, but extreme circumstances do create extreme leaders.
Ernesto Guevara did not become El Che from day to night, he was transformed by his trip around Latin American, radicalized by the poor living conditions of his fellow men, and engaged by the common identity of a single continent from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. It just happens he took to wrong path and he fought for the wrong ideas, and instead of prosperity to the masses, the only things he brought were death and misery, in Cuba, in Angola, and in Bolivia.
His face, now a symbol, still represents carnage and poverty wrapped around an utopian ideal, but ultimately proves the point of this essay: Che was, and still is, a symbol.
We, in the Right, cannot take him for our side, because it would be incoherent and counterproductive, but we must understand what made him as such. Che emerged under the most unlikely conditions and circumstances. Our Che will probably emerge from the most unlikely of the places as well.
Because if one thing is true, that our conflict with the left is indeed a religious fight against a fanatic progressive dogma, then we will also need leaders and martyrs, just like Che was for the Left in the past. We need a Che Guevara of our own.
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Forget The Greenbelt: YIMBYs Should Focus On Permitted Development
Britain needs housing. We all (aside from a tiny minority who don’t understand the concept of household formation) know this. And those of us who want that housing all know exactly who is to blame for the lack of supply: those dastardly NIMBYs and their unenlightened self interest in keeping property prices high.
Perhaps, though, that’s not the whole story. Almost everyone agrees that we need more homes, even if they don’t agree that those homes need to be near them. When you look at opposition to new housing, a pattern emerges – most opposition to housebuilding is opposition to concreting fields with deanoboxes, rather than an ideological opposition to adding any new homes at all. The only organised and large scale opposition in Britain appears to be over greenfield development. Sure, brownfield developments in city centres always get a few people holding signs outside them to oppose building a four storey tower block, but there is no Council for the Protection of Urban England pushing to keep brownfield land as brownfield. Brits like their green and pleasant land and wish to keep it; they aren’t usually so bothered by a couple of houses being built on a garden unless they live right next door and have a feud with their neighbour already.
And who can blame them? The costs of greenfield development, both aesthetically (loss of visual appeal replaced by boxes on concrete) and logistically (increased demand on infrastructure) fall on existing residents, whilst the benefits flow to the landowners and developers (who make the profit) and new residents (who now have a place to live). Compare this to the construction of a backyard rental cottage: the primary beneficiary of the development is the same person who bears most of the costs, so there is less incentive to oppose it, and the cottage is tucked away behind the existing house, where it does not alter the look of the area.
The government expanded permitted development quite a lot in 2020 with little pushback, enabling the owners of houses built between 1948 and 2018 to add additional storeys to their homes. Expanding permitted development rights therefore seems to be a politically feasible route to go down. More feasible at any rate than implementing a zoning scheme and zoning large swathes of greenbelt for new housing. Whilst the standard development pattern benefits landowners at the expense of homeowners, permitted development rights benefit homeowners. Certain options in particular would benefit homeowners with larger houses, who tend to be the voters that the government most wishes to keep onside.
There are a couple of changes that would be natural extensions to the existing policy. First, the right to add a mansard roof to any property not in a conservation area. At present, you are allowed under the permitted development rules to add an ugly dormer to most houses, regardless of their age, and to add a whole floor to many of them. Mansard roofs are more aesthetically pleasing than massive flat dormers, and are significantly cheaper to construct than a full additional storey. This would enable many presently small homes, that are amongst the cheapest of properties for those wishing to get on the property ladder, to be made more suitable for families.
Secondly, the right to add an annexe; or as they are usually called by urbanists and planners, an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU). This is not as radical as it might seem – AFAIK there is nothing that stops one from renting a large ensuite bedroom with an external entrance and additional washbasin, that is totally not a studio flat (no oven, see! It’s not the landlords job to forbid fridges and hotplates and air fryers.) to a lodger, and the only difference between this and a studio flat is the presence of an oven. This would simply expand an existing right to include other extensions such as outbuildings.
The Cameron government introduced a rent a room scheme to try and take advantage of an oversupply of housing (in the sense of bedrooms per person; whilst dwellings per household have gone down, the number of rooms per person have increased since 1960). This is a good direction, but many people do not wish to share their homes with strangers. If part of the home can be carved out into an ADU and rented out, however, that would present a very different proposition that would hopefully see more uptake.
Adding accessory dwellings could have significant impact on rents. As many of the houses that would be suitable for this are owned by pensioners, this would provide an additional source of income – it is a common complaint from pensioners that they aren’t getting enough money. Here would be their chance to fix this. With an increasing supply of rental properties available, there would be reduced pressure on existing homes, which would return to the market for would-be homeowners to purchase. By making it easier and more predictable to add a flat or cottage for granny, the constraint of supply of smaller homes that prevents many people from downsizing would be done away with – those looking to become grandparents could either sell their home to help their children afford to buy, or let their children start families in the existing house.
Permitted development is not unrestricted development, and there’s no reason ADUs would necessarily mean permitting the construction of a large new house on the totality of the garden (existing rights do not allow more than half the curtilage to be taken up by outbuildings anyway). Reasonable restrictions may be: no more than fifty square metres, no more than two tenants (most households are one or two person), one ADU per dwelling, and perhaps councils having the power to require a single parking space.
The political will is not there to straight up abolish the Town And Country Planning Act, and doing so would most likely result in a deluge of poor quality homes and neighbourhoods to meet the pent-up demand. Seventy-five years of planning restrictions have warped housebuilding, it will take time for this to be fixed. But the political will is there to chip away at it within existing neighbourhoods. YIMBYs need to choose their battles carefully – forget the greenbelt for now, pick the fights where there is a hope of winning.
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On the Defamatory Lynching of Eric Zemmour in the British Media | Oliver d’Astreville
When faced with the utter treachery of progressive intellectuals, there are times when one is tempted to go back to the old ways. Show up to their threshold, give them a slap with your glove and then hopefully grant them eternal peace from their nightmarish debility in a duel at the next daybreak. Peace would then return and one would tread home with the gratifying thought of having served mankind. But alas, the time of blood feuds is spent, and the resting lion who could once easily crush the hyenas troubling his sleep is now constrained to articulate his maw into words; explaining to them why it is uncourteous and inappropriate to come to his dwelling and trouble his sleep.
So be it. Let us contend defamation with apology, caricature with truth, and cede the arma to the togae; after all, we have no army at our disposal to cross the Rubicon.
An anglophile, and an admirer of Anglo-Saxon famed freedom of speech and liberalism, I must say I have been rather disappointed by how sententious the analysis of British and American newspapers of Mr Zemmour’s political position has been. After having observed now for two months or so the unceasing manhunt of the candidate by mainstream British media, I thought that one should not let this monochord blabber follow its course without a single objection. For example, let us take a look at this stereotypical leftist hit piece from The Guardian.
Written by what many would call an academic demigod, Didier Fassin, professor in anthropology at the Collège de France, one could have expected this article to be a dense synthesis of a profound analysis of French society and politics. How mighty was my astonishment when I found that the author’s main source regarding Zemmour’s ideas was one pamphlet from the junk information website Slate. I can easily guess that Professor Fassin never thought it worthy of his rank to listen to Mr Zemmour with his ears once in the past decade. Here is the only grounded and meaningful paragraph extractable from Professor Fassin’s article about Mr Zemmour:
“Indeed, he [Mr Zemmour] has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names, approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam, propagated the so-called ‘great replacement’ theory and argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates. He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children. He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria, has contended that Marshal Petain saved Jews during the second world war, and would like the death penalty to be reinstated. His overarching narrative is reversing France’s supposed national decline, which featured again in the video announcing his candidacy.”
Let us dissect these eight claims, in which the author restitutes eight of Zemmour views that he thinks should be problematic and let us try to display to the reasonable and discerning Anglo-Saxon reader how Zemmour’s real positions are not as grossly fascistic and vulgar as Professor Fassin wishes to make it seem.
1. “He has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names.”
Zemmour argues that the civility under which French citizens are recognised in the public space should be a French traditional first name. That is either from the calendar of Saints or prior traditions such as Greco-Latin history. Let us be clear, he does not speak of the use of a foreign name in private life. He does say that one’s ID and passport are not of the private but of the public domain, which is true.
Indeed, the elites of the now frighteningly multicultural city of London might be revolted by this proposal. These “enlightened divines”, as Burke would call them, would also be edified to know that this was a French law, passed by Napoleon. It was only repelled in 1993 when it was stated that parents had the right to freely choose their children’s names. Still to this date judges may forbid names that are judged disadvantageous to one’s future, such as: ‘Borat Miller’ or ‘Mr Bean Smith’. Anglo-American progressives are prompt to project their multicultural conceptions on France, but our histories differ.
At any rate, for most great societies until the twentieth century, the adaptation of foreign names or their outright changing, especially between Western nations, was the rule. In particular, virtually all French Jews between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, adopted French names as they were finally integrated into French society after centuries of rejection.
“We must give the Jews everything as individuals, but nothing as a nation” is a quote from the revolutionary nobleman Clermont-Tonnerre, often uttered by Zemmour, for it matches entirely his own family’s choices and trajectory, that of Jewish France. This cultural assimilation was the way of integrating migrants in France for the past 200 years, since the founding of the Republic and before.
2. “[Zemmour] approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam.”
Muslim people do not share this tradition of adapting names and they never have. After all, Muslims seldom moved to a country outside of the context of invasion and this wasn’t to change until the 20th century when Muslims immigrated to countries for other reasons. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion of law but even more so. Islam requires not only material compliance of its followers but sets a legal and political order of which they are a part. Thus, the historical distinctions of Muslim countries (Caliph, Sultan, Emir, Sheik) are both religious and feudal titles.
Islam also took from Christianity its universal purpose. Islam sought to establish a universal caliphate. But the lector knows of this, as recent history does not cease to recall us that fundamental difference.
In that aspect, Islam is of all religions the closest one to modern totalitarian ideologies, because it seeks to change every detail of private life in a codified manner, and seeks to bring about these changes universally, willingly or by legitimate force. In short, Islam seeks to transform the individual and the world in their totality.
Hitler himself was an admirer of Islamic values, and said, quoted by Albert Speer:
“Theirs [mahomedans] was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
The comparison of Islam and Nazism has at least this much relevance but, of course, it does not aim at saying that Muslims are Nazis, nor that Imams are Gestapo officers.
3. “[Zemmour] propagated the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ theory”
Here, there is no need even for discussion, let alone debate, but just for a brief word.
The ‘Great Replacement’ is but the junction of two simple facts. Firstly, contrary to America, which is based upon no ethnicity, France, as most nations or peoples in the Old World, is very much based upon ethnicity, although not limited by it. France emerged as a nation of people who had shared the same land, history, culture and even religion for 2000 years. In terms of ethnology, France is much closer to the Iroquoian confederation than to the USA. As General Charles De Gaulle famously said to an American diplomat telling him “I know France well, I have lived here for 10 years”, De Gaulle answered, “Well, we have for 2000 years!”
Now, the second idea is even more genuine: The fact that several hundred thousand migrants enter France each year, mainly from African and/or Muslim countries, and that the birthrate of women from these countries is on average twice that of white French women, mathematical law implies that there is a demographic landslide, or “Grand Remplacement” of “European” descendants. Whether it is desirable or not, whether it is even worth discussing, is a question begging to be answered.
So there isn’t anything for Mr Zemmour to propagate but a trivial collection of facts. Most of the people who are willing to vote for him would consider this a major issue independently of his candidacy. Someone ignorant of the ethnic change that France is going through was either in hibernation and has only just woken up, or a very biased leftist who would rather point out the risk of alien invasion than the risk of Islamisation.
4. “[He] argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates.”
Zemmour indeed argues that it is an employer’s right to refuse or grant someone a position for any reason he should see fit, whether it is competence, character or skin colour. To discriminate is to choose. It is a most rational and simple argument: an employer is not a public service and refusing to give someone a job, lease him a car or a property cannot be earnestly considered as harm done to this person.
Let’s be clear, a crime committed for any reason related to race, sex, sexual orientation, colour, religion or even competence, regardless of the reason, is a crime and should be punished as such. But rejecting an application is not a crime. How could an act that is not a crime in itself, be called a crime once the intention underlying it is known? In the end, this is nothing but an impugnation of motives. Undoubtedly, society should in any way possible facilitate the life of those who suffer from objective physical and mental handicaps. I ask Professor Fassin and his Londoner friends: Is Muslim religion a mental illness? Is dark skin a physical handicap? Is sexual orientation an objective deficiency?
No, will they will inevitably answer, but it is perceived as such, and this law should be in effect until all prejudice has been removed from society. Should law have a curative purpose? Justice is absolute, and so are good and evil. Crime is a crime, regardless of the time and context. The circumstance may affect the gravity of it, but not the nature of the act. Therefore, by mindlessly stuffing everything they find disagreeable into the criminal category, the left yields to the reproach made to it by conservatives for two centuries: the progressive idea of justice a contingent one, they ultimately subscribe to sophism, that is believe in nothing except themselves.
The proof that recruitment discrimination cannot be called a crime or an offence, is that it is in practice undetectable. How do you prove that someone was hired or rejected based on their ethnicity rather than on their competence? In most cases, you cannot. How do you prove an organisation has a hiring bias? You have to organise tests, which is akin to pursuing a fly with a sledgehammer.
5. “He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children.’’
The French candidate says some qualities are more closely related to one or the other gender. He states that political power belongs by default to manhood. A clear example of this is the traditional virtue of virilitas so cherished by Republican Rome. For biological reasons, the functions of power, war, and political decision making were, for dozens of millennia, by default masculine functions. Those of education, housekeeping, cooking and, even I dare say, finance were by default feminine ones.
He is right. Of all the folks and communities of mankind ever known on this planet, there was never a single matriarchal society. Some societies are more matriarchal than others, but it is only relative and never absolute. Processor Fassin knows this perfectly well, for he is himself an anthropologist, and in order to disagree with Mr Zemmour, he would have to go against the scientific consensus in his own field.
This again should not be an inspiration for fixed laws in a Republic founded upon the principle of equality between individuals regardless of their sex, and it would be absurd for a patriot of the nation of Joan of Arc to try and relegate women to the household. But that it is not in any way part of Zemmour’s agenda, even by extrapolation.
6. “He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria.”
None will disagree that the massacre of innocents can be excused or even explained. But then again, this is not what Zemmour did: Zemmour lauded a military man’s uncompromising patriotism. He did not excuse this particular command of Bugeaud to suffocate an entire tribe into the cave where they had taken refuge.
Being coherent with my own words, I believe that statues of General Lee should not be taken down in the US, because despite fighting for an evil cause, he was still a great military leader, a patriot, and even freed slaves that he should have received has inheritance, before the war. Alas, few heroes of American, French or British history were saints, and fewer even by modern standards of sanctity. If Lee is taken down, how long before Nelson, Napoleon, Churchill and De Gaulle receive the same fate?
To remind Anglo-Saxon readers of the historical context, one of the casuum belli of the French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards was to put an end to slave raids that had plagued the Mediterranean for a millennium. And this was far from being a pretext, as some historians like to put it. When the French expedition took Algiers it immediately freed several hundreds of French slaves – thousands of European slaves altogether. This excuses nothing but explains how the struggle between the Western and Muslim worlds is not a recent, superficial or arbitrary one, and how the situation cannot be naively diagnosed in all abstraction of history.
7. “[Zemmour] has contended that Marshal Pétain saved Jews.”
Marshal Pétain and the regime of Vichy generally speaking – despite being regimes founded upon the treason of the French nation, forsaking the alliance with Britain, and collaboration with Nazi Germany – spared France from total defeat. Fighting to the end would have meant that the whole of France would have been conquered and placed under direct German governance, like Poland, Czechia or Greece. One knows that in the latter countries, the proportion of Jews who died in the Holocaust reached 90%, in the case of Greece or the Netherlands. In France, it was around 10%. Vichy leaders still instinctively rejected Nazi racist axioms. In France, in Italy, in Spain, Jews undeniably found a better shelter from hatred and deportation than under direct German rule.
This does not mean that Mr Zemmour ignores the existence of the Vel d’Hiv deportation, of the Lois Juives, or of the militia’s massacres, and general servility of Vichy towards Germany. He acknowledged it and maintained his position all the same.
Be that as it may, this historical thesis was not at all invented by him. It was generally accepted in France, even defended by Jewish and Israeli historians, until the publication of Robert Paxton’s book Vichy France which condemned Vichy as altogether evil. Recently, an Israeli historian has published sources that demonstrate the active role of Vichy in attempting to protect French citizens, regardless of their religion, from the Gestapo and the SS.
I think that Pétain was a traitor to France, but history is complex. This matter is still an area of academic debate, and I believe it will forever remain a matter of opinion. Only the party that wants to censor the other one will truly be wrong.
8. “[He] would like the death penalty to be reinstated.”
One can reasonably disagree with Mr Zemmour, and join the liberals who believe, like Victor Hugo, that “Vengeance is human, Justice is divine. The State is in between, its role is to heal, to better the men.”
Nevertheless, support for the re-establishment of capital punishment is widespread among French people. Some months ago, the Rwandese refugee who burned the cathedral of Nantes, that had been left to roam about by the police because “He was not subject to detention under European laws of asylum” said the French interior Minister Darmanin, eventually found the primary target of his arson, the vicar of the cathedral, and stabbed him to death, in the Vendée. Most of the perpetrators of the past ten years were known to be dangerous by the intelligence services but were still left free because of lack of space in prisons or EU legal restrictions.
But there again, Mr Zemmour’s support for the death penalty is anecdotical in the greater picture of his battles and it is certainly not something he would have the leisure and popularity margin to reinstate if he managed to beat Le Pen and Macron.
As a way of conclusion, I will say that it matters greatly for foreign conservatives or reactionaries to understand their French comrades and comprehend the hope we put in Mr Zemmour. For every new decay brought by progressivism in any one of our nations inevitably ends up plaguing the other ones, and we have a common interest in vanquishing deconstructivism in the West as a whole. One could not forget how the French theory (it is a shame in itself that such devilry should be characterised as French) crept from the intellectual boroughs of Paris, insidiously wrecking itself on the shores of New England, and eventually mutated into the notorious, dreadful and destructive cancel culture that scourges our time.
The fact that a member of the Collège de France, pretty much the equivalent of Cambridge Trinity College in England, should write a derogatory article about a French presidential candidate in the British media demonstrates what is wrong with France’s establishment. The establishment of my country lives in an enclosed penthouse, more concerned about what foreign elites think of them than about what their own people think about them. Sound familiar?
Where their fate might be worse than that of Britain’s establishment, is that their minds and their logos are colonised by Anglo-Saxon structures, and they play the role of New-England progressives more readily than that of French scholars. Professor Fassin is probably eminent in his field, but in this particular case, he blatantly used his position and network at The Guardian to cast a stone at My Zemmour, because of political enmity. Even in the case that The Guardian did ask him for his contribution, he could have passed, quite obviously not being an expert in the matter.
I will also indulge in begging The Guardian, or any British media outlet, that if they should wonder about Mr Zemmour’s views they should simply ask him directly and let Professor Fassin return to his studies, by which he is certainly much beguiled so that he has no spare time to come down from Mount St Genevieve and seek quarrel in the political arena.
One last sting: The Guardian seems to gather and spread information about France only through those with whom they are in ideological communion; the same way that the American or Soviets informed themselves about the countries they invaded or ‘freed’, only with the local communists, pro-West or Shia Muslims. I think I am fair to call this a colonial method.
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